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Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread

I haven't, but I really really want to. A girl at work was RAVING about it the other day.

It's funny because I had never even heard of the thing before I went to go see Star Wars, and the trailer played in front, and I was just thrown at the back of my seat going "WHAT IS THIS AMAZING THING IN FRONT OF MY FACE OMG MUST SEE IT."

Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread

So I just watched the entire fourth season of House Of Cards today. It's good. There's another series that netflix released recently called "Fuller House". It's a pseudo-sequel / spin-off show for the old "Full House" show.

So I watch the last episode of House Of Cards...

SPOILER Show

... which featured a beheading on live TV at the very end of the final episode...

... and then the credits started rolling and the screen shrank down to the top-left corner and up popped a recommendation that the next thing I watch should be "Fuller House". I couldn't help but laugh my ass off.

Also related to House of Cards' season finale:

SPOILER Show

Claire broke the fourth wall with Francis. That, for me, had more impact than the beheading. On an even weirder note, I hope that they kill off Doug Stamper eventually. That guy is monumentally stupid and every minute they spend on his character feels like a waste of my fucking time. I wish he had died in the episode where he got his head bashed in.

I still like it. Still a solid show after four seasons. I give it a couple more before they totally run out of shit, tho. The next season should either be the last or should set up the 6th to be the last. Trying to stretch it beyond that will probably sour it.

Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread

It's videogame shit, so it doesn't belong in this thread, but I'm definitely not playing it, so it doesn't belong in "what are you playing" and i don't think it belongs in a 'cool video' thread. More 'random shit' thread material, but there isn't one, really, and I'm not gonna make my own thread for this. Ramble...

So yeah, this is single-player gameplay from the new DooM game. I watched it while getting more and more frustrated by the people talking and the horrifyingly generic looking gameplay going on. So let's list off all the ways DooM is now one of the weakest, me-too piles of crap I've ever witnessed instead of the industry leading innovator it started out as:

1) Story with an antagonist. Cutscenes. Scripted sequences. 'Log files'. Disembodied voiceovers. We need a plot.2) Pointless upgrades. Mod your weapons. Add different ammo types. It adds nothing, but players like choice, right?3) Takedowns. Close to an enemy? Push a button and watch a canned animation of you ripping off it's jaw.4) Shiny! Pickups glow. Enemies glow. Interactive things glow. You'll never have to think with glowy things!5) Button prompts! Are you stupid? Don't worry, we'll tell you which button to push and when to push it!6) Everything in this world is made of metal and plastic, because modern game graphics are good at making things look like metal and plastic.7) Interaction animations! Nothing says awesome like a two-second delay every time you try to open a door!

I stopped watching when both the PR guy AND the 'journalist' guy didn't know the name of one of the enemies. They're getting paid to talk about a game and they can't fucking name the enemies in the game. There was no variation in the enemies. The enemies all have generic attacks and mostly just stand around. The first section of the game featured mostly enemies who didn't even have projectile weapons... There are like three enemies in the classice DooM games who don't have projectile weapons, and one of those enemies IS THE PROJECTILE FOR ANOTHER ENEMY! The person playing the game just waded into a room that had both a Revenant and a Mancubus on top of like five other enemies and he just ran around and killed them and got hit for maybe 30 points of damage the whole time. And the journalist guy was like "What is that thing?" and the PR guy is like "Uh, I dunno... A Hell Knight?"

Meanwhile, this douchebag had previously been talking about how fans of the older games would probably appreciate the fact that they can turn off the glowy bits to get more of that 'authentic' old-school experience.

/vent

Edit: Oh, and I forgot... The chainsaw is apparently just a one-hit-kill-pretty-much-anything weapon, but in order to use it you have to have enough "chainsaw ammo". And then using the chainsaw to kill something will drop a bunch of other ammo. For some reason. Because the only reason to use the fucking thing is when you run out of other ammo, right? Not, you know, because it would be fun.

Not that pressing a button to get a shitty gore cutscene would be all that much fun anyway...

And holy shit, there's a part where they guy looks at a floor vent, a button prompt comes up and he kicks the floor vent in and apparently that's a secret area! They button-prompted the secret area!? And he'd gotten a map thing, and the secret area was on the fucking map as well!?

Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread

Two things:

First, the new Ghostbusters trailer #2 came out. Still looks like shit to me. Made worse by the inclusion of lots of additional references to the original and the Stay Puft Marshmallow man. Except it's not the Stay Puft Marshmallow man. It's the ghost from their logo. But the only reason they put it in the movie was probably so they could have a giant white monster-ghost that looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and the only reason they put it into the trailer was to trick people into thinking the same.

Secondly, I've sat down and watched some actual gamers play the new DooM game, and while I still greatly dislike a lot of things about it, it actually doesn't look as bad as I thought it did in all of the promotional materials they released. Which I suppose means that they were trying to sell the game by making it look way shittier than it actually was for some reason. I still don't like some of the fundamental design choices they made, tho, and I think they should have taken a different approach to the basic mechanics of the game.

First thing to axe completely are the glory kills. Many people have made fun of the Polygon video where whoever was playing the game appeared to have never played an FPS videogame before. But they were playing it very much like how a lot of modern games get played. You run straight up to shit and use the insta-kill melee attack that stabs people in the throat with your knife, because that's the most efficient way to kill enemies. You also don't spend much time in modern games running and gunning and instead move from cover to cover so you can wait for an enemy to stop firing and then pop up and shoot them. This paradigm creates a situation where many modern gamers probably haven't spent a lot of time being forced to aim at shit precisely while moving around. The scenarios where you do have to do that are mostly limited to multiplayer, and the tactics on display in that video aren't far off from what you see in typical multiplayer games. Lack of a slow-targeting system like you get in CoD when you shoulder your weapon is probably to blame for the poor aiming ability.

In short, modern games have probably trained that person to suck at oldschool FPS games.

So axe that and get rid of the glowy shit and prompts for everything. Replace the melee kills with a system that promotes a more diverse skillset and tactics for dispatching enemies. Most of the gameplay videos I see feature a lot of the same sort of 'run up to enemy while shooting, hit insta-kill button, win' sort of tactic on every enemy encounter. Introduce some new enemy types that the player needs to more or less avoid close contact with, forcing them to take a different approach to those enemies. Have the enemies interact with each other more. One of the main tactics of DooM was to get the enemies to fight each other or inadvertently shoot each other. Maybe keep the chainsaw the way it is, but VERY limited use if it's insta-kill.

Some of the bosses look good. The architecture of Hell looks nice and diverse. I would prefer a lot more blatantly satanic imagery. Nothing says satan like pentagrams, goat heads and inverted crosses. If you're gonna go with a theme, push it to the limit.

But yeah, it looks like an OK game with a lot of little annoying things in it rather than a complete clusterfuck of a game with a DooM skin on it. I might even buy it and try it out if I can ever manage to get some money in my bank account again.

Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread

Blood Father trailer.

This looks promising. I hope Mel continues to keep his career in an upswing. The guy's fucking good. He may be an asshole with addiction problems, anger / emotional issues and a religious nutjob, but the guy is fucking good at making and starring in movies. I hate it when people do some stupid shit and then everyone decides that that person is an asshole and needs to be prevented from doing that one thing that everyone agrees they do really well.

He's also got a movie in post-production right now called Hacksaw Ridge which also sounds very good. Neither of these is a 'big' movie, but it will hopefully give him some traction and positive motion toward getting his career back on track so he can continue giving me awesome shit to watch.

I miss him. I hope he keeps directing bigger and bigger movies. But hell, even if he were to stick to smaller shit like what he's been doing with Blood Father and Get The Gringo and shit like that, that would be fine with me. I want Mel to be a gritty, angry anti-hero. Those are generally the roles that he's been best at throughout his career.

Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread

Nobody here has commented on this year's Oscar nominations yet, so I'll be the first one to acknowledge the elephant in the room: FOURTEEN fucking nominations for La La Land.

I don't hate La La Land. I enjoyed for what it is: a nice little musical with pleasant, but not very memorable, songs. But FOURTEEN nominations? Seems like the Academy fell for the same Jedi Mind Trick once again. The central theme of this movie ("a love letter to Hollywood" AKA "look how awesome we are") simply screams award bait. Will anyone remember La La Land ten years from now? I suspect it will become the new Shakespeare In Love, Benjamin Button or English Patient - a half-forgotten footnote. Also, just a few years ago, a movie as impressive as Cloud Atlas got nothing. The Academy needs fresh blood, 'cause those old white men are stuck in the fucking past, like a cat chasing the same old laser pointer all his life.

The question I'd like to ask our resident industry professionals is: do you think that this is going to change anytime soon? I wouldn't know, I'm just a random idiot on the Internet. What do you think?

Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread

Even as someone who is deliberately decoupling himself from pop culture, I feel zero hesitation declaring that Auralnauts are geniuses who are putting the finishing touches on a form of art that will forevermore evolve from their template. Their Star Wars edits are like Citizen Kane.

Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread

Admittedly Ive only watched it the once but I remember the distinct feeling that it was REAAAALLLY leaning on the non-sequiter humour and scenes to get through it. It felt like the least cohesive story episode of them.

Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread

I'm bored, so I went through my collection of movies and made a list of 50 movies, pared down a bit from about 75 or so. These are the movies I have that, if I were to be flipping around the TV and it happened to be on, I would immediately just watch that. In no particular order:

I dunno why I made a list of these, and after I made it I had no idea what exactly to do with it.

Bonus film: the 51st one that just barely got knocked off the list was The Fifth Element. There are probably other films that I've forgotten. I didn't scour my collection, I just kinda glanced around to see what jumped out at me. I also noticed that I have three copies of Akira, three copies of Blade Runner and four copies of Schindler's List...

Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread

So... between the title, the setup that the trailer provides, and now this poster, we're getting very strong indicators that mother! might actually be Aronofsky's stealth Rosemary's Baby remake. I am so down for this.

Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread

I just want to give Orson Welles the biggest damn hug. From an article on the destruction of The Magnificent Ambersons and the quixotic search for a workprint of the footage the studio burned:

Peter Bogdanovich, who was very close to Welles from the late 1960s through the mid-70s, and who for a time even let Welles bunk in his Bel Air home, remembers an incident that took place in the early 70s when he and his then girlfriend, Cybill Shepherd, paid a visit to Welles and his companion, a Croatian actress named Oja Kodar, in Welles’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Orson had this habit—you’d be having a conversation, and food would be there and whatever, and he sat rather near the TV with the clicker,” he says. “So he was clicking it and watching it go, with the sound turned down a bit. I had my eye half on the TV, and there was a flash of Ambersons that I caught. He was off it almost before I could see it, because he obviously recognized it before I did. But I still saw it, and I said, ‘Oh, that was Ambersons!’ And Oja said, ‘Oh, really? I’ve never seen it.’ [Mimicking Welles’s stentorian boom:] ‘Well, you’re not going to see it now!’ And Cybill said, ‘Oh, I want to see it.’ We all said, ‘Let’s see a little bit.’ And Orson said no. And then everybody said, ‘Oh, please?’ So Orson flipped to the channel and walked out of the room in a huff.

“So then we all said, ‘Orson, come back, we’ll turn it off.’ [Wellesian boom again:] ‘No, it’s all right, I’ll suffer!’ So we watched it for a while. And then Oja, who was sitting furthest forward, kind of gestured to me. I looked back, and Orson was leaning in the doorway, watching. And as I remember, he came in and sat down. Nobody said anything. He just came in and sat down rather close to the set and watched for a while, not too long. I couldn’t really see him—his back was to me. But I looked over at Oja at one point, who could see him because she was sitting on the other side of the room, and she looked at me and gestured like this. [Bogdanovich runs a finger down his cheek from his eye, indicating tears.] And I said, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t watch this anymore.’ And we turned it off, and Orson left the room for a while and then came back.”

This incident went undiscussed for a few days, until Bogdanovich summoned the nerve to say, “You were very upset watching Ambersons the other day, weren’t you?”

“Well, I was upset,” Bogdanovich remembers Welles saying, “but not because of the cutting. That just makes me furious. Don’t you see? It was because it’s the past. It’s over.”

I'm trying to finish up his directorial roster this year (I've done Citizen Kane, Macbeth, The Lady from Shanghai, Chimes at Midnight, and F for Fake in years past), but I don't think I can bring myself to do Ambersons because of how fucking depressing a story lies behind it.

Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread

Oh hey, another Welles post because he was kind of the fucking man. Just stumbled across this op-ed he wrote about segregation back in 1944. Excerpt:

What is described as "feeling" against some races can't be further respected. "Feeling" is a ninnyish, mincing way of saying something ugly, but the word is good enough for race hate when we add that it's a feeling of guilt.

Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature. But this is true: we hate whom we hurt and we mistrust whom we betray. There are minority problems simply because minority races are often wronged. Race hate, distilled from the suspicions of ignorance, takes its welcome from the impotent and the godless, comforting these with hellish parodies of what they've lost—arrogance to take the place of price, contempt to occupy the spirit emptied of the love of man. There are alibis for the phenomenon—excuses, economic and social—but the brutal fact is simply this: where the racist lie is acceptable there is corruption. Where there is hate there is shame. The human soul receives race hate only in the sickness of guilt.

The Indian is on our conscience, the Negro is on our conscience, the Chinese and the Mexican-American are on our conscience. The Jew is on the conscience of Europe, but our neglect gives us communion in that guilt, so that there dances even here the lunatic spectre of anti-semitism.

This is deplored; it must be fought, and the fight must be won.

The poll tax is regretted; it must be abolished.

And poll tax thinking must be outlawed. This is a time for action. We know that for some ears even the word "action" has a revolutionary twang, and it won't surprise us if we're accused in some quarters of inciting to riot. FREE WORLD is very interested in riots. FREE WORLD is very interested in avoiding them.

We call for action against the cause of riots. Law is the best action, the most decisive. We call for laws, then, prohibiting what moral judgment already counts as lawlessness. American law forbids a man the right to take away anothers right. It must be law that groups of men can't use the machinery of our Republic to limit the rights of other groups—that the vote, for instance, can't be used to take away the vote.

It's in the people's power to see to it that what makes lynchings and starts wars is dealt with, not by well-wishers, but by policemen.

For several generations, maybe, there will be men who can't be weaned from the fascist vices of race hate. We should deny such men responsibility in public affairs exactly as we deny responsibility to the wretched victims of the drug habit. There are laws against peddling dope; there can be laws against peddling race hate.

That every man has a right to his own opinion is an American boast. But race hate isn't an opinion; it's a phobia. It isn't a viewpoint; race hate is a disease. In a people's world the incurable racist has no rights. He must be deprived of influence in a people's government. He must be segregated as he himself would segregate the colored and Semitic peoples—as we now segregate the leprous and the insane.